The purpose of this critical literature review was to generate awareness of the LGBTQIA+ engineering student experience and research on this community, while also highlighting areas that are lacking or receiving insufficient attention. This work is part of a larger project that aims to review engineering education research with respect to LGBTQIA+ students, higher education faculty and staff, and industry professionals. This literature review was conducted in two phases. First, works from non-engineering disciplines were reviewed to identify popular threads and major areas of research on the LGBTQIA+ student experience. This phase was not an exhaustive review; rather, it was meant to establish specific themes of importance derived from the larger body of literature on the LGBTQIA+ student experience. Second, a literature review identified how engineering-specific research on the LGBTQIA+ student experience aligned with these themes. We identified several themes in the first phase of the literature review: (1) Climate, (2) LGB Monolith, (3) Intersectionality, and (4) Identity Development. Engineering and engineering education literature demonstrated similar themes, although this body of work was unique in the exploration of LGBTQIA+ coping strategies and the use of the technical/social dualism framework. Overall, the engineering education literature on LGBTQIA+ student experiences seemed relatively underdeveloped.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-3165-9230
Arizona State University
[biography]
Madeleine Jennings is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant at Arizona State University - Polytechnic Campus, pursuing a PhD in Engineering Education Systems and Design. They have a MS in Human Systems Engineering and a BS in Manufacturing Engineering.
Rod Roscoe is an Associate Professor of human systems engineering in the Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, and is a Diane and Gary Tooker Professor of Effective Education in STEM. He is affiliate faculty of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Center for Gender Equity in Science and Technology (CGEST), Research for Inclusive STEM Education (RISE), and the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming (CHART). His research investigates how the intersection of learning science, computer science, user science, and inclusion science, can inform effective and innovative uses of educational technologies. He is also interested in how engineering education can better prepare future engineers to consider the human elements and impacts of their work, particularly with respect to more equitable and inclusive outcomes.
Nadia Kellam (she/they) is Associate Professor of Engineering and the Associate Director for Research Excellence within The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. She is a faculty in the Engineering Education Systems and Design PhD program. Dr. Kellam is an engineering education researcher and a mechanical engineer. She is also deputy editor of the Journal of Engineering Education and co-chair of ASEE’s Committee on Scholarly Publications. In her research, she is broadly interested in developing critical understandings of the culture of engineering education and, especially, the experiences of marginalized undergraduate engineering students and engineering educators.
Suren Jayasuriya is an assistant professor jointly between the School of Arts, Media and Engineering (AME) and the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering (ECEE) at Arizona State University. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 2016 - 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2017, and a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. His research interests are in computational imaging and photography, computer vision and graphics, sensors, and education.
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